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Utility DX

A GRAVES reflection from a meteor trail, August 21st, 2017 at 10:51 UTC. Received with FDM-S2 from Elad, a discone antenna and software V3 from Simon Brown

Undoubtly, a Graves is a fine French wine from the Bordeaux region in western France. So it is so surprise that also GRAVES is an extraordinary Radar station. It was built to detect and follow satellites and their debris. They sequentially cover from 90° to 270° azimut in five big sectors A to D, and change from sector to sector each 19,2 seconds. Each of this sector is further divided into 6 segments of 7,5° width, covered for 3,2 seconds each.

They are transmitting on 143,050 MHz. If you are in Europe and tune into 143.049,0 kHz USB, you probably will hear/see some reflections of meteors, airplanes and even spacecraft. The distance between the transmitter and my location is about 630 km, and for their southly directed transmissions, there most of the time is no direct reception.

So, if you tune into 143.049,0 kHz, you will see just a blue spectrogram: noise. If you wait for a while, some signals will appear out of this blue; see screenshot on the top. With Simon Brown’s free software Version 3 you may also take a level diagram in smallest time steps of just 50 milliseconds:

A level diagram of the meteor trail reflection from the spectrogram at the top, visualized qith QtiPlot.

This level diagram shows the big advantage of SDRs, working on the signals on HF level, rather than of audio level as with legacy radios. The latter additionally introduce e.g. noise and phase errors. Of course, you may also listen to this signal:

From this audio, in turn, you may do an audio spectrogram, possibly revealing further details of e.g. of the trilling sound like that from a ricocheting bullet: The Searchers (the 1956’er Western film by John Ford, not the British boy group from 1960 …) on VHF.

Audio spectrogram of the sound, revealing “packets” of sound which result in the trilling audio. At start, these packet show a width of about 42 milliseconds to be reduced to 37 milliseconds.

P.S. If you want to donate: my favourite Graves is from Domaine de Chevalier, blanc …

Tune into 6330,4 kHz LSB, to get the right black/white frequencies, centered at 1.900 Hz. Shift 1.000 Hz, so 1.400 Hz = white, 2.400 Hz = black. 120 RPM/576 IOC, no APT! Received on June 9th, 2017, at 04:50 UTC.

Reports of the death of Murmansk FAX had been slightly exaggerated … After having searched for it in vain in 1Q/17, it now popped up on 6.328,5 kHz from former 6.445,5 kHz with an irregular schedule, namely at 03:30 UTC at one day and 04:50 UTC another day.

Just fair quality of both, conditions and transmitter, made it very difficult to read the text in the upper part of this weather chart in Cyrillic, with just: Прогноз … 21 час [Prognosis … 21 hour …]. Receiver AirSPy & SpyVerter, decoder Wavecom W-Code.

Also received on June 1st, 2017, but starting at 03:30 UTC – same area, first half of the transmission heavily distorted by an RTTY signal, see below:

Reception on June 1st, 2017, from 03:30 UTC on 6.328,5 kHz.

Iceberg Prognosis has been received on scheduled 8.444,1 kHz at 20:00 UTC on June 8th, 2017; see below:

Murmansk FAX with Iceberg Prognosis on 8.444,1 kHz at 20:00 UTC on June 8th, 2017. Cyrillic texts not quite readable. Also received on May, 31st, 2017, same frequency, same time.

Alaskan station HAARP is re-activated for some scientific purposes in late February, 2017. I received them on 2.800 kHz as well as on 3.300 kHz with carriers showing their scheduled pattern. Alas, reception was too weak to make out any modulation. See screenshots below, containing all sufficient data like time, frequency, resolution etc. Reception has been done in Northern Germany with FDM-S2 by ELAD at a quadloop antenna of 20 m circumference.

HFDL is a net for data communications between airplanes and ground. The results can be shown on Google Earth. This screenshot shows a part of 29.000+ entries, received and processed on August 15th, 2016.

Communications between air and ground is mostly done on VHF, UHF and SHF. But if an aircraft is out of reach of a ground station station due to the limited “radio horizon” of these bands, it has to maintain communications by either satellite or HF. This HFDL net is in fact the most massive professional user of HF right now. Within 24 hours, I get more than 40.000 live messages with a modest equipment.

With his software Display Launcher, Mike Simpson from Australia provides a most valuable tool to analyze up to nine channels in parallel. His software also draws positions and routes onto Google Earth. Mike has spent much energy on coping with many inconsistencies of transmitted data before it all really goes smoothly.

This free software is the vital part of a monitoring project to receive, demodulate and analyze live up to nine HFDL channels in parallel. Other ingredients you need is a software-defined radio (SDR), nine virtual audio cables (in fact, a piece of software) and a decoder software. Don’t forget an antenna and a PC …

This setup comprises a semi-professional monitoring station which will allow you to receive and track many of the nearly 3.000 airplanes using HFDL. This also covers the military, business jets, helicopters and some other delicate users. It maybe used as an important complement to Flightradar24’s web service, whenever their VHF/UHF/SHF-based net is out of range of the aircraft. This is particularly true over vast water masses like oceans and sparsely populated land masses. Furthermore, Flightradar24 erases some sensible flights from the raw material before publication on their website. This is clearly no “censorship”, but some thoughtfulness in regard to those countries where reception and publication of HFDL data is more tolerated than explicitly encouraged by the government.

In a 9-page PDF, I published a step-by-step recipe on how to set up such an HF monitoring station for up to nine parallel HFDL channel. You can download it here.

If you ever had an ear on the aero bands, you are already familiar with ICAO Selcalls. With this 2 x 2 tone signal lasting for about 2,2 seconds, a Ground Station alerts a specific airplane to open up for communications. The short video on top of this page shows a typical initial contact, where Ground an Air are testing the Selcal.

This paper (click this hyperlink) describes on three pages with nine illustrations, one video and one audio the procedure and gives some background information. These may improve correct decoding of the somewhat delicate signals, as it will show how to look up the Selcal and follow the flight. BTW: It is planned to extend the pool of 16 tones to 32 tones by September 1st, 2016.

P.S. Remember to save the PDF and open it with a recent version of Acrobat Reader. Otherwise the multimedia (video, audio) will not work!

The world is full of software-defined radio (SDR), but HackRF One has a rather unique position – thanks to its vast maximum bandwidth of 20 MHz. With an up-converter, this combination covers more than 70 percent of the whole HF range from 3 to 30 MHz. Even better: with proper software you can record and play this enormous band!

However, this stunning bandwidth is achieved by a moderate resolution of 8 bit, resulting in a dynamic range of just nearly 50 dB. Or the half of SDRs like Elad’s FDM-S2.

Anyway. I wanted to know in practice what you can actually do with such a set at a budget price plus mostly free software. The results surprised even me: Properly used, this combination convinced as a quite decent performer on HF! The world map above shows some of the stations received with the set (see insert bottom left) to test its performance.

I laid down my experiences and recommendations for best reception in a paper of 17 multi-media pages full of examples – including 55 screenshots, 21 audio clips and one video. The PDF shows how to optimize reception of broadcast, utility and amateur radio stations. It covers many examples on how to analyze recordings, to decode data transmission with free software plus live decoding of 14 channels in parallel. It also gives some examples of combining HF reception with the internet, e.g. regarding the reception of signals from airplanes (ARINC, HFDL) and vessels (GMDSS).

My experiences really left me enthusiastic about this set.

You may share this enthusiasm and download the PDF of 43 MB here. Save it on your hard disk or USB stick, and open it with a most recent Adobe Reader. Otherwise, the multimedia content will not work.
[Einen deutschsprachigen Test habe ich jeweils als Titelgeschichte in der April- Ausgabe 2017 der Fachzeitschrift Radio-Kurier – weltweit hören und in der Mai-Ausgabe der Fachzeitschrift Funktelegramm veröffentlicht.]

The video shows how to combine some software to get and visualize more information from your HFDL monitoring.

HFDL is a data mode, intensively used between air and ground. You can receive these data and decode it with e.g. PC-HFDL software. These data maybe automatically streamed to software PC-HFDL-Display. It takes up to six sources and displays all information neatly in a spread-sheet style.

If you click on the Flight Number in the resulting spread-sheet, website flightradar24 opens up and shows the complete route of this flight, together with many other data.

Note, that not each and every Flight Number is listed on the flightradar24 page. This page relies mainly on position reports on the ADS-B network, transmitted on 1,090 GHz with a range of rarely more than 400 km. Out of this range, HFDL steps in. ADS-B plus HFDL is a charming combination as is the two software and the web service presented in the above video. Click HD button at bottom right there (“Enable HD Quality”) to get the best quality.